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If you’re reading this, you are probably know the story of the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve well enough to tell it from memory. The highlights would probably go something like:
Satan comes, in the form of a snake, to tempt Eve.
The temptation is to eat the forbidden fruit—the fruit of the tree God warned them not to eat of.
Eve succumbs to the temptation, and then shares the forbidden fruit with Adam, who …
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So, how much does the world we live in resemble the world God created in Genesis 1?
To answer that, we are going to need more details about that world. Fortunately, Genesis helps us there. We may not find everything we want to know, but everything we need to know to follow The Story is there.
Genesis is written as a series of stories—each explaining what happened to someone or something from the preceding story. In …
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What must it have been like, to experience the Garden of Eden?
For most of us, paradise probably sums it up. And with that comes visions of tropical beaches and cool drinks. Tables full of food. Leisure. Relaxation. Opulence.
I think some of these at least partially capture the idea, but it’s worth pausing to consider the details as we begin to think about what went wrong. In order to appreciate what was lost, we’ll need …
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“And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” Genesis 2:25 (NAS95)
As The Story begins in Genesis, Adam and Eve find themselves in the midst of paradise. The verse above just might describe the pinnacle of that paradise.
This captures the situation immediately after Eve is introduced into The Story. They were naked. And it seems to have been a good thing. Naked and unashamed.
Yet today, nakedness tends to …
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Note — A busy travel schedule interrupted my writing for the Summer. As we move toward Fall, I plan to resume the writing routine of last Spring, posting a brief introduction and questions one week in anticipation of an article the following week. But rather than picking up where we left off, I want to start a new topic — “The Story”.
Where did we come from?
Every answer I know of can be grouped under …
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Note — In the past, I have tried to produce articles on a regular schedule. If the topic required more attention than I could give it in the time I had allotted myself, I simply broke the discussion up into several smaller pieces. However, as I came to this article, I felt it needed a more cohesive treatment than this approach allows. So, I have taken three months to produce it. It is much …
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5 Steps to Walking By The Spirit
Sounds appealing, doesn’t it?
Many of us have been believers for more years that we care to count, and yet “walking by the Spirit” remains an nebulous concept. You would think by now, someone would have laid it out for us, step by step.
The fact that the concept remains so mysterious to so many of us leads me to a couple of conclusions. Either everyone else is just as clueless, or it …
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So, if we’re a believer, we have the Spirit. And this Spirit was given to us so that we could know the mind of God — a level of communication even deeper than direct conversation. Yet we find ourselves asking how God communicates with us, fearful that the most we can hope for is guidance from documents recorded at least 2000 years ago. How is it possible for us to have the Spirit, yet be …
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How would you define a “spiritual” person?
For as long as I can remember, the pinnacle of the Christian journey has been to achieve “spiritual” status. But what does that mean?
Let’s start with our assumptions. Take a couple of minutes and write down the first things that come to mind about “being spiritual.” How would you describe a “spiritual person”?
What scriptures can you think of that speak to the issue of being “spiritual”?
In the passage …
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I have a number of coins my grandfather gave me through the years. For the most part, they were either recently minted silver dollars or reproductions of older coins; all of them encased in a special plastic holder. Each time he gave me one, I sensed he saw a value in them that eluded me. To me, they seemed to be worth about a dollar a piece.
Today, I keep them in a safe deposit …
